May 28, 2012 Memorial Day Dinner – Roasted Duck and Sweet Potato and Fiddlehead Ferns.

May 28, 2012 Memorial Day Dinner – Roasted Duck and Sweet Potato and Fiddlehead Ferns.

Suzette wants to go back on our diet, so she decided that she wanted a low calorie dish like sweet potatoes and fiddlehead ferns for dinner and we decided to make tabouli with the abundance of mint parsley that had gone to seed in our garden, so we stopped at Sunflower Market and bought grains, cous cous ($2.49/lb), bulgur wheat and sweet potatoes, artichokes ($.88 each) and yams.

When we arrived at home, we got into a cooking frenzy.  I soaked a cup of No. 2 Bulgur in water and plucked a basket full of parsley and a large handful of mint and chopped them and threw them into the drained Bulgur and then added Moroccan olive oil and the juice of a lemon and chopped up two roma tomatoes and put all that into the tabouli and put it into the fridge. 

I then cut a bit of the stalk off the artichokes and boiled them for 1 ½ hours in water flavored with olive oil and red wine vinegar.

I then made a sauce for the artichokes.  I mixed about on cup of mayonnaise in a bowl with some lemon juice a chopped shallot, some tarragon vinegar, some fresh tarragon from the garden and a dash of Worcestershire Sauce. 

For dinner we looked in the freezer and saw the frozen PPI beast quarters from the Roasted Duck dinner we had prepared before we left town, so we thawed those out and Suzette cleaned the Fiddlehead Ferns and I fetched the PPI Orange Sauce from the fridge and chopped up about 1 Tbsp. of onion and melted abut 1 ½ Tbsp. of butter in an enameled sauce pan and sautéed the onion for a few minutes.  Then I threw in the sauce and some Madeira and Suzette put in a few slices of orange and some orange juice and I put in more butter.

Suzette chopped the sweet potato into chunks and blanched them and put the duck breast into a baking pan and put them in a 350° oven.  Then Suzette chopped a shallot and sautéed it in a skillet with a clove of garlic and then threw in the blanched sweet potatoes and then the fiddlehead ferns.  After a few minutes of sautéing the fiddleheads and when the orange sauce was hot and the duck heated through, we plated the lovely multicolored ingredients.   They made a beautiful plate of food. 

We served the food with a bottle of De Ponte Rosé from Oregon’s Willamette Valley.  Although lovely and light, I thought the rosé was a little light for the heaviness of the duck and sweet potatoes.  I guess we should wait for garden parties during the hot days of summer to fully appreciate the rosé.

Bon Appétit